The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of Integrated Circuits (IC). An effective way of verifying a design can be achieved by adding assertions to the design. Automatic translation of hardware specifications from natural language to assertions in a formal representation has the potential to improve the verification productivity of ICs. However, natural language specifications have the characteristics of being imprecise, incomplete, and ambiguous. An automation framework can benefit verification engineers only if it is designed with the right balance between the ease of expression and precision of meaning allowed for in the input natural language specifications. This requirement introduces two major challenges for designing an effective translation framework. The first challenge is to allow the processing of expressive specifications with flexible word order variations and sentence structures. The second challenge is to assist users in writing unambiguous and complete specifications in the English language that can be accurately translated. In this dissertation, we address the first challenge by modeling semantic parsing of the input sentence as a game of BINGO that can capture the combinatorial nature of natural language semantics. BINGO parsing considers the context of each word in the input sentence to ensure high precision in the creation of semantic frames. We address the second challenge by designing a suggestion and feedback framework to assist users in writing clear and coherent specifications. Our feedback generates different ways of writing acceptable sentences when the input sentence is not understood. We evaluated our BINGO model on 316 hardware design specifications taken from the documents of AMBA, memory controller, and UART architectures. The results showed that highly expressive specifications could be handled in our BINGO model. It also demonstrated the ease of creating rules to generate the same semantic frame for specifications with the same meaning but different word order. We evaluated the suggestion and rewriting framework on 132 erroneous specifications taken from AMBA and memory controller architectures documents. Our system generated suggestions for all the specs. On manual inspection, we found that 87% of these suggestions were semantically closer to the intent of the input specification. Moreover, automatic contextual analysis of the rewritten form of the input specification allowed the translation of the input specification with different words and different order of words that were not defined in our grammar. / Doctor of Philosophy / The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of hardware circuits. An effective way of verifying a design is to add programming codes called assertions in the design. The creation of assertions can be time-consuming and error-prone due to the technical details needed to write assertions. Automatically translating assertion specifications written in English to program code can reduce design time and errors since the English language hides away the technical details required for writing assertions. However, sentences written in English language can have multiple and incomplete interpretations. It becomes difficult for machines to understand assertions written in the English language. In this work, we automatically generate assertions from assertion descriptions written in English. We propose techniques to write rules that can accurately translate English specifications to assertions. Our rules allow a user to write specifications with flexible use of word order and word interpretations. We have tested the understanding framework on English specifications taken from four different types of hardware design architectures. Since we cannot create rules to understand all possible ways of writing a specification, we have proposed a suggestion framework that can inform the user about the words and word structures acceptable to our translation framework. The suggestion framework was tested on specifications of AMBA and memory controller architectures.

The use of Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks continues to yield better results in natural language processing tasks. One area which recently has seen significant improvements is semantic dependency parsing, where the current state-of-the-art model uses a multilayer LSTM combined with an attention-based scoring function to predict the dependencies. In this thesis the state of the art model is first replicated and then extended to include features based on syntactical trees, which was found to be useful in a similar model. In addition, the effect of part-of-speech tags is studied. The replicated model achieves a labeled F1 score of 93.6 on the in-domain data and 89.2 on the out-of-domain data on the DM dataset, which shows that the model is indeed replicable. Using multiple features extracted from syntactic gold standard trees of the DELPH-IN Derivation Tree (DT) type increased the labeled scores to 97.1 and 94.1 respectively, while the use of predicted trees of the Stanford Basic (SB) type did not improve the results at all. The usefulness of part-of-speech tags was found to be diminished in the presence of other features.

This thesis deals with automatic syntactic analysis of natural languagetext, also known as parsing. The parsing approach is data-driven, whichmeans that parsers are constructed by means of machine learning, lookingat training data in the form of annotated natural language sentences. The syntactic framework used in the thesis is dependency-based. Robustness is one of the characteristics of the data-driven approaches investigated here.The overall aim of this thesis is to maintain robustness while increasing accuracy.The content of the thesis falls naturally into two tracks, a transformation track and a combination track. The  rst type of transformation investigatedis called pseudo-projective, because it enables strictly projective dependency parsers to recover non-projective dependency relations. Informally,a non-projective dependency tree contains crossing binary directed relations, when drawn above the sentence. Experimental results show that pseudo-projective transformations can improve accuracy significantly for a range of languages. The second type of transformation aims to facilitate the processing of specific linguistic constructions such as coordination and verb groups. Experimental results again show a positive effect on parsing accuracy for several languages, often greater than for the pseudo-projective transformations. However, the improvement of the transformations dependson the internal structure of the base parser, which is not the case for thepseudo-projective transformations. The combination track compares various approaches for combining data driven dependency parsers, again as a means of improving accuracy. As different parsers have different strengths and weaknesses, making parsers collaborate in order to  nd one single syntactic analysis may result in higher accuracy than any of the syntactic analyzers can produce by itself. The experimental results show that accuracy improves across languages, giventhat appropriate parsers are combined. The thesis ends with an attempt to combine the two tracks, showing that combining parsers with different tree transformations also increases accuracy. Moreover, this experiment indicates that high diversity among a small set of parsers is much more important than a large number of parsers with low diversity.

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We analyze globally normalized transition-based neural network models for dependency parsing on English, German, Spanish, and Catalan. We compare the results with FreeLing, an open source language analysis tool developed at the UPC natural language processing research group. Furthermore we study how the mini-batch size, the number of units in the hidden layers and the beam width affect the performances of the network. Finally we propose a multi-lingual parser with parameters sharing and experiment with German and English obtaining a significant accuracy improvement upon the monolingual parsers. These multi-lingual parsers can be used for low-resource languages of for all the applications with low memory requirements, where having one model per language in intractable.

<p>This licentiate thesis deals with automatic syntactic analysis, or parsing, of natural languages. A parser constructs the syntactic analysis, which it learns by looking at correctly analyzed sentences, known as training data. The general topic concerns manipulations of the training data in order to improve the parsing accuracy.</p><p>Several studies using constituency-based theories for natural languages in such automatic and data-driven syntactic parsing have shown that training data, annotated according to a linguistic theory, often needs to be adapted in various ways in order to achieve an adequate, automatic analysis. A linguistically sound constituent structure is not necessarily well-suited for learning and parsing using existing data-driven methods. Modifications to the constituency-based trees in the training data, and corresponding modifications to the parser output, have successfully been applied to increase the parser accuracy. The topic of this thesis is to investigate whether similar modifications in the form of tree transformations to training data, annotated with dependency-based structures, can improve accuracy for data-driven dependency parsers. In order to do this, two types of tree transformations are in focus in this thesis.</p><p>%This is a topic that so far has been less studied.</p><p>The first one concerns non-projectivity. The full potential of dependency parsing can only be realized if non-projective constructions are allowed, which pose a problem for projective dependency parsers. On the other hand, non-projective parsers tend, among other things, to be slower. In order to maintain the benefits of projective parsing, a tree transformation technique to recover non-projectivity while using a projective parser is presented here.</p><p>The second type of transformation concerns linguistic phenomena that are possible but hard for a parser to learn, given a certain choice of dependency analysis. This study has concentrated on two such phenomena, coordination and verb groups, for which tree transformations are applied in order to improve parsing accuracy, in case the original structure does not coincide with a structure that is easy to learn.</p><p>Empirical evaluations are performed using treebank data from various languages, and using more than one dependency parser. The results show that the benefit of these tree transformations used in preprocessing and postprocessing to a large extent is language, treebank and parser independent.</p>

<p>This licentiate thesis deals with automatic syntactic analysis, or parsing, of natural languages. A parser constructs the syntactic analysis, which it learns by looking at correctly analyzed sentences, known as training data. The general topic concerns manipulations of the training data in order to improve the parsing accuracy.</p><p>Several studies using constituency-based theories for natural languages in such automatic and data-driven syntactic parsing have shown that training data, annotated according to a linguistic theory, often needs to be adapted in various ways in order to achieve an adequate, automatic analysis. A linguistically sound constituent structure is not necessarily well-suited for learning and parsing using existing data-driven methods. Modifications to the constituency-based trees in the training data, and corresponding modifications to the parser output, have successfully been applied to increase the parser accuracy. The topic of this thesis is to investigate whether similar modifications in the form of tree transformations to training data, annotated with dependency-based structures, can improve accuracy for data-driven dependency parsers. In order to do this, two types of tree transformations are in focus in this thesis.</p><p>The first one concerns non-projectivity. The full potential of dependency parsing can only be realized if non-projective constructions are allowed, which pose a problem for projective dependency parsers. On the other hand, non-projective parsers tend, among other things, to be slower. In order to maintain the benefits of projective parsing, a tree transformation technique to recover non-projectivity while using a projective parser is presented here.</p><p>The second type of transformation concerns linguistic phenomena that are possible but hard for a parser to learn, given a certain choice of dependency analysis. This study has concentrated on two such phenomena, coordination and verb groups, for which tree transformations are applied in order to improve parsing accuracy, in case the original structure does not coincide with a structure that is easy to learn.</p><p>Empirical evaluations are performed using treebank data from various languages, and using more than one dependency parser. The results show that the benefit of these tree transformations used in preprocessing and postprocessing to a large extent is language, treebank and parser independent.</p>

We present Depfix, a system for automatic post-editing of phrase-based English-to-Czech machine trans- lation outputs, based on linguistic knowledge. First, we analyzed the types of errors that a typical machine translation system makes. Then, we created a set of rules and a statistical component that correct errors that are common or serious and can have a potential to be corrected by our approach. We use a range of natural language processing tools to provide us with analyses of the input sentences. Moreover, we reimple- mented the dependency parser and adapted it in several ways to parsing of statistical machine translation outputs. We performed both automatic and manual evaluations which confirmed that our system improves the quality of the translations.

[pt] Análise de dependência consiste em obter uma estrutura sintática correspondente a determinado texto da linguagem natural. Tal estrutura, usualmente uma árvore de dependência, representa relações hierárquicas entre palavras. Representação computacionalmente eficiente que vem sendo utilizada para lidar com desafios que surgem com o crescente volume de informação textual online. Podendo ser utilizada, por exemplo, para inferir computacionalmente o significado de palavras das mais diversas línguas. Este trabalho apresenta a análise de dependência com enfoque em uma de suas modelagens mais populares em aprendizado de máquina: o método baseado em transição. Desenvolvemos uma implementação gulosa deste modelo com um classificador neural simples para executar experimentos. Datasets da iniciativa Universal Dependencies são utilizados para treinar e posteriormente testar o sistema com a validação disponibilizada na tarefa compartilhada da CoNLL-2017. Os resultados mostram empiricamente que se pode obter ganho de performance inicializando a camada de entrada da rede neural com uma representação de palavras obtida com pré-treino. Chegando a uma performance de 84,51 LAS no conjunto de teste da língua portuguesa do Brasil e 75,19 LAS no conjunto da língua inglesa. Ficando cerca de 4 pontos atrás da performance do melhor resultado para analisadores de dependência baseados em sistemas de transição. / [en] Dependency parsing is the task that transforms a sentence into a syntactic structure, usually a dependency tree, that represents relations between words. This representations are useful to deal with several tasks that arises with the increasing volume of textual online information and the need for technologies that depends on NLP tasks to work. It can be used, for example, to enable computers to infer the meaning of words of multiple natural languages. This paper presents dependency parsing with focus on one of its most popular modeling in machine learning: the transition-based method. A greedy implementation of this model with a simple neural network-based classifier is used to perform experiments. Universal Dependencies treebanks are used to train and then test the system using the validation script published in the CoNLL-2017 shared task. The results empirically indicate the benefits of initializing the input layer of the network with word embeddings obtained through pre-training. It reached 84.51 LAS in the Portuguese of Brazil test set and 75.19 LAS in the English test set. This result is nearly 4 points behind the performance of the best results of transition-based parsers.